Collaborations and Partnerships in User Experience

Collection Description
User experience (UX) is a team sport; no one expert or domain can do UX alone. UX involves knowledge and practices from many academic disciplines, industries, government agencies, community organizations, and users themselves. Instone (2005) argued that user experience should be an umbrella topic that unites various professionals. But UX expertise does not always cross boundaries between disciplines and industries, preventing UX professionals from working together and sharing knowledge. User experience work demands better collaboration.

This collection invites submissions about developing productive collaborations and partnerships in user experience research, design, methodology, testing, and teaching. To illustrate the power of collaboration, this collection invites submissions from a wide variety of UX participants within and beyond academia. We welcome submissions from faculty and students in disciplines such as human-computer interaction, computer science, psychology, engineering, art, technical communication, communication, rhetoric, health, marketing, business, and elsewhere. UX professionals from industry, government, non-profits, and other organizations are also highly encouraged to submit. Multi-authored works and submissions from outside of the United States are especially welcome (please note that all submissions must be written in English).

Submission Types
To provide varied perspectives on UX collaborations, this collection invites three types of submissions:
Academic Chapters: 7,000-9,000-word chapters describing academic research. Chapters can describe theory, empirical research, case studies, or pedagogical approaches.
Case Studies: 1,500-2,000-word descriptions of specific cases of UX collaboration in industry, academia, or other settings. Descriptions should include context for the cases, the collaborators involved, the UX problem or challenge the collaboration addressed, the results of the collaboration, and lessons learned.
Lessons Learned and Best Practices: Approximately 1,000-word descriptions of lessons learned about UX collaboration or best practices gleaned from specific experiences in industry, academia, government, or other contexts.

Possible Questions to Address
Possible topics for submissions of all types include the following:
Where can UX collaboration happen? What stakeholders, experts, practitioners, and users should be involved in UX collaboration, and how?
What obstacles stand in the way of productive UX partnerships? How do differences in ideologies, vocabulary, methodologies, contexts, communication strategies, and ethics impede successful collaboration? How can we work to overcome these obstacles?
How can different types of UX tools and approaches - such as personas, journey maps, mental models, usability testing, and others - improve collaboration? How can we change these tools to better collaborate?
Which UX methods foster productive collaborations? Which UX methods need to change or adapt to allow for better collaborations?
How can user experience professionals truly collaborate with users, not only to develop better products but to empower users as legitimate stakeholders and knowledge creators?
What can we learn from successful or unsuccessful UX collaborations?
What kinds of collaborative research projects can user experience scholars and practitioners foster? How can academia, industries, government and community organizations, users, and others partner together to build user experience knowledge?
What kinds of organizational practices (Agile, lean, cross-functional teams, etc.) or technologies can lead to better UX collaborations?
How can UX collaborations and partnerships occur in cross-cultural contexts?
How can university teachers and administrators partner with stakeholders such as other academic departments, corporations, advisory boards, government organizations, and community members to develop UX courses and programs that prepare students for collaboration in their future careers?
How can UX curriculum, research, and practice contribute to social justice work? How can UX practitioners form truly just relationships that empower historically marginalized groups and communities?
How can UX collaborations improve the accessibility of products for a greater variety of users?
What voices and perspectives get left out of UX work? How can we include and center those voices to enable better, more ethical UX collaborations?

Submission Instructions
Interested authors should submit an abstract that includes the following information:
Academic Chapter Abstracts
Submission Title
Author Name(s) and Institutional and Industrial Affiliation(s)
Submission Type (Academic Chapter)
200-300 word description of the proposed piece. Your abstract should summarize the major aspects of the chapter: 1) the overall purpose of the piece and the research problem(s) or question(s) you address; 2) the basic method and/or theoretical approach of the chapter; 3) relevant scholarship; and 4) findings or arguments of the chapter.
Case Study or Lesson Learned/Best Practices Abstracts
Submission Title
Author Name(s) and Institutional and Industrial Affiliation(s)
Submission Type (Case Study, Lessons Learned)
100-200 word description of the proposed piece. Your abstract should summarize the general purpose of the piece: 1) the context of the collaboration you describe; 2) the UX challenges or opportunities this collaboration addresses; and 3) lessons learned from the collaboration experience or case study.
Please send abstracts as .doc or .pdf attachments to ryan.weber@uah.edu or joy.robinson@uah.edu by December 10, 2019.

Schedule
Abstracts Due: December 10, 2019
Contributors Notified: January 15, 2019
Drafts Due: June 1, 2019

Editor Bios
Dr. Joy Robinson
Joy Robinson is an assistant professor at The University of Alabama in Huntsville and teaches Technical Communication, New Media, and User Experience courses. She currently runs the UAH UX Lab where her research focuses on collaboration and teaming in various work contexts. Her work has been published in TCQ, JTWC, CDQ, and IEEE ProComm. Her latest article "A Geographic and Disciplinary Examination of UX Empirical Research Since 2000" investigated UX research in the US.
Dr. Ryan Weber
Ryan Weber is an Assistant Professor of English at The University of Alabama in Huntsville. His research areas include user experience, entrepreneurship writing, and science communication. His work has appeared in publications including Communication Design Quarterly, Technical Communication Quarterly, IEEE: Transactions in Professional Communication, Journal of Technical Writing and Communication.